


Bellamy and Clarke Confront Paradise

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, post-S3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-11
Updated: 2018-02-11
Packaged: 2019-03-16 22:20:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13645602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: “When Jaha came back to Arkadia, he’d stand outside or in the commons, and he’d talk about the City of Light as this magical place where there was no pain and no hurt and no death.”“Too good to be true, right?” This might just be a wry observation on the events of the last few days, or it might be a question: is that why you were never tempted?“Mmm. That, and every chipped person I met seemed to have had their personality surgically removed. He made it sound like paradise, though. So—”—a glance at her—“I’m curious.”Following the destruction of the City of Light, Bellamy and Clarke contemplate the future, the nature of paradise, and the imperfections of Earth. A post-S3 AU in which there is no oncoming (second) apocalypse.





	Bellamy and Clarke Confront Paradise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arthurpendragonz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arthurpendragonz/gifts).



> Happy Valentine's Day arthurpendragonz!

**Bellamy stands at the doors of the City**    

The Rover runs out of power at the edge of the woods. Bellamy uses the last of the reserves to turn the vehicle around, so that it's facing toward Polis again but the solar panels on its roof are unobscured by tree-shadow and open to the sky, and the back doors look out to a view of the fields. This whole area used to be farmland once. But not anymore. Maybe it's gone bad, useless still from the radiation of a century ago. Or maybe the Grounders just don't want it, for some strange reason known only to them.    

He and Clarke prop open the Rover's back doors, spread out a blanket and sit down, side by side and shoulder to shoulder, their legs dangling over the edge.   

The overgrown farmland stretches almost to the horizon, its pattern of long grasses and weeds broken only by the trail their own vehicles and the Grounders' horses have cut through it, and, off to the right, by a single farmhouse, barely standing. Its windows are broken and its roof caved in. Next to it, a small cluster of trees encroaches. Someday, as the house continues to rot into the ground and the tress continue to grow, they will devour it completely. Then, later still, they will merge with the forest as it creeps ever closer, taking back the land.  

He'd like to walk over and explore it up close. Step over the threshold, see the tree roots cracking up through the floor.  

The night is warm and humid, the air thick and breathless. Not a whisper of breeze disturbs them, waves the grass or sends fluttering the leaves in the trees. If it weren’t for the smell—the thick, rich smell of dirt and growth that Bellamy would like to associate with spring—he might start to question his vision. He would wonder if he were staring at no more than a depiction of the Earth, a flat painting recreated on one of the Ark's glowing tablet screens, and not the vastness of the Ground itself spread out lush and real in front of him.  

Because it is warm, because the night is pressing in on all sides like an extra skin, Clarke has taken off her floor-length heavy jacket and shoved it in the back of the Rover. She's ditched her corset too, and taken down her hair, untangled the last of her braids. Now her shirt flows around her loose and tattered, and her hair, long and ratty at the ends, falls down her back and over her shoulders. She looks a little like the Clarke he used to know, and a little like a stranger. She resembles a woman transforming. Or a creature shedding its old skin.  

As he watches, she lifts her hand and lets it hover, for a moment, over her chest and the bandages she's placed over the wounds there, like she wants to test out the edges of them but knows she shouldn't. She lowers her hand again slowly. Then she plants the heels of both hands on the Rover floor, one on either side of her, and curls her fingers over the edge. She tips her whole torso forward like she wants to breathe all the more deeply of the starlight and the moonglow.  

"Clarke?" he says, and she startles and almost loses her balance.  

He didn't mean to frighten her: his voice was quiet. But it's been a long time since either of them spoke. Privately, he thinks they needed to get some miles between them and Polis first, between themselves and Abby and Kane and Octavia, between themselves and the wreckage A.L.I.E. left behind. He'd been uncertain about leaving at all. But _I've got it_ , Miller told him. _I can handle it. Just take Clarke home._    

He didn't add _get yourself home too_ , but Bellamy heard the sentiment in the unusual gentle-low pitch of Miller's voice, and he'd felt no desire in himself to fight.  

"Sorry," he adds, now, as Clarke pulls herself back, even though she's smiling and the expression is equal parts self-deprecation and relief. She shakes her head and squeezes his leg briefly, just above the knee. Telling him to go ahead.  

"Can I ask you something?"  

"Sure." She shoots him a small, encouraging smile.  

He opens and closes his mouth a few times because the words, clear in his mind, have caught in his throat. Clarke waits and watches him patiently. 

“What was it like,” he manages at last, “in the City of Light?” 

Not what she was expecting, clearly. Her lips part, and a furrow creases down between her eyebrows. Then she turns away from him again and looks out across the fields. “Why do you want to know?” 

“Not because I wish I’d taken the chip!” The idea is so preposterous that his voice comes out loud with laughter, and he’s not even insulted by the stiff straight-backed way she’s sitting or the how she’s folded her hands just so in her lap. That uptight princess attitude that he knows she will drop in a second, because it suits her so poorly. “Not for a second. You know that. It’s just—” 

“What?” 

“It’s—when Jaha came back to Arkadia, he’d stand outside or in the commons, and he’d talk about the City of Light as this magical place where there was no pain and no hurt and no death.” 

“Too good to be true, right?” This might just be a wry observation on the events of the last few days, or it might be a question: _is that why you were never tempted?_

“Mmm. That, and every chipped person I met seemed to have had their personality surgically removed.” 

She smiles a little at that one, and he allows himself a smile too. Whatever tension there was between them has deflated, like the stiffness between Clarke’s shoulders, and he feels all right bumping his arm against her arm as he takes in a deep breath, an inhale of heavy night air to ground him. He lets it out slowly and murmurs, “He made it sound like paradise, though. So—”—a glance at her—“I’m curious.” 

Clarke doesn’t answer for a long while. Bellamy listens to the small sounds of her body shifting, her fingers pulling at her sleeves, his feet or her feet clanging sometimes against the underside of the Rover as they swing their legs. He waits for Earth sounds. He imagines distant animals or birds or bugs, off in the forest or hiding in the grass; he hopes for a sudden rustle of breeze. 

“It was a city,” she says, abruptly, just as he’s gotten used to the quiet again. “I mean—a literal city. A pre-war city with tall buildings and clean streets. And everything,” she pauses, a half-hitch of breath, and crinkles her nose, “everything was clean.” 

Bellamy thinks of Polis, the dirt and dust of the streets, the ruins of buildings, the tattered additions made of refuse and scrap. “I don’t think the real pre-war cities were spotless,” he says.  

“No,” Clarke agrees. “It didn’t feel like a real place at all. More like a vision or… a simulation.” She considers a moment longer, and adds, “But there was no injury or pain or death. Just like Jaha said. There’s something tempting about that. If you want to call it paradise.” 

She doesn’t sound too convinced that it is, so he asks, “What do you think paradise is really like?” 

“Oh,” Clarke sighs, leans her weight back on her hands and looks up at the sky, like she’s remembering home. “I don’t know, Bellamy. Right now, I don’t know.”  

 

 

 **The gang plays a game**

June crests, and with it a high pitch of sweltering, oppressive heat. Raven lies back, stares at the bleached-out white of the sky and thinks, _If this is the beginning of summer, there's no way I'll make it to fall_. Then she laughs, under her breath and to herself. It's funny to think that, after everything, a bit of sweat and sun could even come close to bringing her down. 

"Watch out," Miller's voice deadpans from somewhere below and to her right. "I think Raven's lost her mind." 

She snorts. _Unlikely_. "I was just thinking about something. It's not important." 

Nothing seems important, or at least not urgent, when the air is weighted down with its own heat, when stepping outside is like opening a furnace, and she is stopped short every time by a thick blast like machine heat, but of the Earth's creation, not their own. Still, they're basking in it. Raven's taken the Rover outside and they've set themselves up just beyond Alpha Station: Jasper and Monty leaning back against the front wheel, Miller sitting on one of the fire pit logs, and Raven herself stretched out across the hood, propped up on the windshield with the sun shining on her face and her bare arms and neck. 

"Then it's your turn," Jasper says. She glances down and sees that he has tilted his head all the way back to look at her. "Where on Earth do you want to be right now?" 

_Where on **Earth**...? _ She turns the words around in her head. In truth, right here in Arkadia doesn't seem so terrible right now, but Raven knows that answer is unacceptable. Not only because their little scrap metal town is small and dingy, beset by squabbles over the past and stressed by an ambient anxiety about what the future may bring—but because the world is VAST and the purpose of the exercise, as Jasper and Monty have explained it to her, is to let their imaginations _roam_. 

"I think I'd like to go to the Arctic," she decides, and the others groan. 

"That's so obvious," Monty complains. 

"No, no—" She leans up on one elbow. Her shirt sticks to her back; a rivulet of sweat slips down between her shoulder blades. "I'd have a sled and a pack of huge dogs—" 

"Huskies?" Miller asks.

Raven doesn't have any idea what a huskie is—besides, obviously, some type of large dog—but she's more shocked that Miller _does_ than in the gap in her own knowledge. He's staring up at her like he's honestly interested, invested in her vaguely sketched tale of the distant frozen north. It's a strange look on him, who is so often either determined or dismissive, or distant in an unknowable in-between. 

She's about to ask what that's about when she's distracted by the approach of two figures: Bellamy and Clarke, striding toward them as Monty and Jasper wave them over. They're coming from the direction of the main gates, but they've obviously not been outside long. Neither has the wilted look that too much time beneath the sun's rays brings. And they don't argue, either, when Monty tells them to sit down, or make a single comment about the work that isn't going on. Bellamy just asks, "What did we miss?" and Clark knocks her knees against his and leans her head on his shoulder. So, Raven decides, they must both be in good moods. 

"We're playing _where on Earth?_ ," Monty explains. "This round's question is _where on Earth do you wish you were right now?_ " 

"I said I want to see some palm trees," Jasper says. When he mentions this fantasy, his voice takes on a light and distant timbre, like the breeze they haven't felt for days, a tone that Raven’s never heard from him before. She thinks it might be a new part of him. Or maybe something old, now resurrected. "Monty wants to go to the rainforest," he adds. "And Miller said the beach." 

"Raven was just telling us about the Arctic," Miller puts in, which might be a way of mocking her, since she was just making shit up. 

She leans back against the windshield again, turns her head away from the harshest glare of the sun, and squints in Bellamy and Clarke's direction. "What about you two?" she asks. "The rules are it has to be somewhere real and it has to still exist." 

"Or exist as far as we know," Monty clarifies. Because, of course, what do they know of the world beyond the few hundred miles they have travelled? It could be nothing but a wasteland. It could be filled with wonders beyond the imagination of even the most well-read historian on the Ark. 

Bellamy thinks for a moment, but not as long as Raven expected he would. His fingers are playing with Clarke's fingers. They've started to do things like this more often, Raven's noticed, ever since they got back from Polis: casual touches, leaning on each other, arms brushing together as they walk. Never on purpose, as far as she can tell, but like a new habit, subtly and unconsciously built. Maybe they're having an affair on the side. The idea has occurred to her, but—probably not. If they were, deeply private people that they've now become, they'd be more careful about hiding it. 

"I'd go to a city," Bellamy is saying. "An abandoned city. And I'd wander around and look into the buildings and see if I could find anything interesting." He shrugs, and looks down like he’s embarrassed. Too much of himself exposed, perhaps: an unexpectedly intimate desire laid bare by a simple game. 

He glances over at Clarke, and she takes in a deep breath, sighs, and then announces, "A picnic by a lake. With the best food in the world." 

Raven takes in her small, excited smile, how she tries to bite it back but it just grows, and the way she looks down at her boots next to Bellamy's boots, and how she squeezes his hand, and thinks, _who is this Clarke?_ She imagines her as a vision from another life, one with fewer casualties, where all the best of who they could have been was able to flourish, instead of mutating and twisting into something gnarled and new. 

“So you _don’t_ think the food in Arkadia is the best in the world?” Jasper asks, cutting off the moment with an exaggerated lightness that might be teasing, might be baiting. Monty knocks his shoulder against Jasper’s like a warning.

Clarke looks up abruptly, uncertain too. Then she tilts her head, catches his eye, and says, with all seriousness, “Jasper, your cooking really might be the best in the world.”

Raven smiles. _She’s trying_ , she thinks, _she’s really trying_.

Everyone in Arkadia is, of course; it is what defines them now. They’re testing out the edges of this new and tentative peace, coming to terms with the past, feeling out the still-uncertain contours of the future. Daring to be hopeful. But for no one is it more difficult, Raven decides, than for Bellamy and Clarke, because they carry not just what has been done to them but what they have done, because they feel the full weight of the past on all sides like the press of humid air against the skin. An ambient, heavy, guilt, filling the lungs anew with every breath.

In time the burden will ease, or she hopes as much. In time, in all eventuality—but there is no easy solution, no quick fix. (She knows because she’s tried.) Still. It would be nice if the Earth, after everything it’s taken, could give them back something small at least. 

 

 

 **Clarke loses sight of the path**

When her mother tells her to _go on, Raven and the others are waiting outside_ , Clarke doesn’t immediately move. She stands in the doorway of medical and tries to understand what those words even _mean_ ; they sound like little better than nonsense syllables, like she’s lost control over her faculties at last. _Go where?_ she wants to ask. _Waiting to do what?_

Abby just shoos her away again. Clarke lets her curiosity win out over her reticence. 

The Rover is sitting with its nose pointed toward the still-closed gates. There is no one around, though, except Bellamy, who's standing by the driver's side door like he's ready to go. But when Clarke asks him what's going on, he just shrugs. 

"Kane sent me out here," he tells her. "He said it was something important but that was it." His tone is gruff, his shoulders squared and tense. Clarke gets the impression that he asked quite a few questions and got nowhere. Now he's wary and annoyed, so she reaches out and gives his arm a squeeze, without thinking. 

"My mom was the same," she says. She pinches the front of her shirt and waves it, trying to create an artificial breeze. The temperature has dropped a little since June, but the air is still humid and heavy. Clarke longs for a strong bluster of wind. "But she didn't seem nervous. To be honest," she glances around, takes in the sagging, shaky outbuildings, a small group of kids kicking a ball across a patch of trampled dirt, "I don't care. I'd love to get out of Arkadia for a day." 

On her worst days, it feels like living on the Ark, still. Elections for a new Chancellor are tentatively set for the beginning of August, with potentially a new Council to come after, which has brought the once far-distant horizon of the future almost close enough to touch. Questions of _living_ have crept up into the space left abandoned by the unflinching necessity of _survival_ ; this i _s_ a luxury and a source of worry both. Clarke is nevertheless in favor of the elections. Bellamy is not, and they debate the question sometimes, in the evening in her room: she sits at her desk and he paces by the window, turning his back to her and looking out at the treeless gray mud outside when he gets too angry. But he never ends the night angry. And she never goes to sleep with that hard lump of frustration sitting heavy in the middle of her chest. Before he leaves for his quarters, he always gives her a hug, and she tries not to linger too long with her arms around him in return.

For now, he just shrugs, toes his boot into the ground and says, "I know. Whatever we're doing, Miller's involved. Kane mentioned him." 

"And Raven," Clarke adds. 

"And Jasper and Monty, apparently," Bellamy finishes, nodding at a spot over her shoulder. Clarke half-turns and sees the four of them, heading with purpose toward the Rover. Bellamy tilts his chin up in Miller's direction and asks, "Do you know what's going on here?" 

"We're going on a trip," Miller answers, unhelpfully. He claps Bellamy on the shoulder, then subtly maneuvers him away from the Rover's door. 

This allows Monty to sneak in around him and climb up into the driver's seat. "And I'm driving," he adds. "Jasper already called shotgun so the rest of you are in the back."  

Bellamy looks like he's ready to burst with a near-violent counter-argument—Clarke's never seen him ride in the back of the Rover; she finds the image hard to conjure—but he pulls himself back in the next moment. "All right," he says, holding up his hands and falling into step behind Clarke. "But I still find all of this really suspicious." 

"Your suspicion has been noted," Raven says, as she yanks open the back doors. She does not sound especially concerned. She seems, instead, so purely happy, even joyous, that Clarke finds it impossible to conjure in herself even the slightest unease. Maybe they're going trading. Maybe they're attending a meeting with one of the clans. Or maybe, most simply, most miraculously, they are going exploring, simply because they can. 

By the time Monty pulls out of Arkadia's main gates, even Bellamy has relaxed some. He listens to Jasper's stories, laughs at Raven's jokes. He curls his arm around Clarke's shoulder, and she leans into his side. 

With no windows to see out of, space and time start to lose meaning in equal measure, until she stops wondering altogether where they're going and becomes instead content with where they are. 

 

 

**Bellamy and Clarke confront paradise**

By the time Monty pulls the Rover around in a wide circle and brings it to a halt, Clarke has fallen asleep, and Bellamy has sunken into an uneasy, apprehensive mood again. Clarke’s head is on his lap, her hand resting, lightly curled, over his knee. He combs his fingers through her hair and thinks, _At least we’ll know what’s happening soon_.

Instead, Jasper, Monty, and Raven hop out, announce they’ll be right back, then close the doors behind them. Out the back, in the moment of Raven’s exit, Bellamy catches sight of a weed-choked parking lot and early dusk.

He turns to Miller. “Are you staying behind to guard us?” he asks.

If Miller hears the quiet annoyance in his voice, he seems only amused in return. “I’m keeping you company,” he answers, and grins.

As they wait—ten minutes or an eternity, Bellamy has no way to tell—Clarke shifts in her sleep, hides her nose against the inside of Bellamy’s leg. The back of the Rover feels airless and small. Tiny sounds, like the scrape of Miller’s heel as he stretches out his leg, disrupt an otherwise complete and stifling silence, and he finds himself wondering what might happen if only Miller weren’t here. What might happen if Clarke were to wake and find them alone, and in the uncertainty of waking find herself moved by the same honesty and bravery that he has found slowly accumulating within himself?

Finally the back doors bang open, Clarke startles awake, and Raven announces loudly, “Okay, we’re ready”

“Ready?” Clarke repeats. She sits up blearily, rubs at her eyes, pushes her hair out of her face. She glances to Raven first, then back at Bellamy. He just shrugs. He does not know what is happening, or even how to react to what he does know: that their friends have driven them to an abandoned and decaying city, which reaches up behind them, foreboding and quiet and of unfathomable age—and yet they seem, even Miller, near giddy with excitement at their destination. As he jumps out of the Rover, he takes in not only the urban scene to his right, but the massive arc of a bridge just to his left, which crosses over a wide and sedate river. Raven and Miller are already heading toward it.

"Hey." Monty bumps at his arm to get his attention and Bellamy turns toward him. "You think you can trust us for a little longer?"

The words are perhaps an apology, perhaps also a favor returned: his attempt at saying the right thing at the right time. Bellamy gives a tense, short nod in return. What he means is that he wants to, at least, and that he'll try.

Because Jasper never returned to the Rover, only five of them set off across the bridge. He and Clarke come last. They hold hands as they walk, and every time he glances over the side and down to the river, and his inner sense of balance tries to convince him that the bridge is not made of as sturdy stuff as it seems, he clings again to the reliable presence of Clarke next to him, her feet walking in step with his feet.

The bridge touches down again on what appears to be an island, an island near strangled with an overwhelming riot of green. A few signs of human life remain: an illegible wooden sign, a pair of benches choked with vines, and a barely visible path, which they start to follow around the island's edge.

"At what point do you explain what, exactly, we're doing here?" Clarke asks, as she shoves back an unruly branch. Her own curiosity and excitement are obviously starting to wear thin.

"Just trust us," Raven calls back over her shoulder. "It will be obvious soon."

"Just a suggestion," Bellamy says, "but maybe next time you plan a surprise, you should make it a little less complicated—"

He cuts himself off, stops short as they veer sharply to the left and come, finally, through the trees and to the promised destination at last.

"Surprise!" Raven shouts.

For a moment, Bellamy stands utterly still and takes in the scene. He has no idea what to say. Whatever he was expecting, whatever rudimentary guesses he hadn't quite put into words, it wasn't this. He senses from Clarke's stunned silence that she feels much the same.

They're standing on a wide flat rock, which juts out into the water, and in the middle of which is arranged a blanket and two of the fanciest dinners he's seen since coming to the ground—that he has ever seen, really, in his whole life: meat, mushrooms, bowls of nuts and berries, and even some vegetables from the Arkadia garden, all laid out carefully, just for them. Jasper stands over the array, grinning, obviously proud.

"It's a picnic by a lake," he announces. "Actually, it's a river. And it might not be the best food in the world. But I can promise it is the best food in Arkadia."

"And we're also in the middle of a city," Monty adds. "So after you eat, you can take the Rover and explore."

"Get it?" Raven asks. "It's—"

" _Where on Earth?_ " Clarke finishes. "Our answers to _Where on Earth?_ " She sounds, not surprised, but rather awed, her breath caught on the same amazement that is making it impossible for Bellamy to speak. That their friends have put so much effort toward them, toward doing something nice simply because they can and because they want to, moves him more than the smell of the food or the sight of untamed forest and coursing river do.

"Thank you," he manages, and though the words are course and low, he's sure that the others have heard by how fiercely they hug him and Clarke before they leave, disappearing back into the trees again.

"Do you know what's weird?" Clarke asks, as they sit down to eat.

Bellamy raises his eyebrows. _Many things_ , he thinks. _You'll have to narrow it down._

Clarke smiles, pops one of the berries in her mouth, and says, "If you look in that direction," she gestures behind her, "you can see the city. But if you look over there," she points over Bellamy's shoulder, "it looks like endless forest."

"Huh." He'd already noticed the city, the pattern of skyscrapers that, from this distance, could almost pass as new, that look almost as he pictures buildings looked before the bombs. But when he glances behind him, he notices that there is no equivalent view to that side. From Clarke's perspective, they are in a boundless wilderness.

He turns back to her again. "It feels like we have the entire world right here, almost."

Her smile widens. "I was thinking the same thing."

As they eat, they talk about the whole world, not the wounds or bitter pains of the past, nor the uncertainties of the future, but the wondrous possibilities of the Earth it's taken them their whole lives to find.

Later, after they've packed up their dishes in the basket Jasper left behind, after they've stood and stretched and as they linger, watching the current course and ripple over itself, Clarke turns to him abruptly and says, "I've been thinking."

Bellamy has been thinking too. He's been thinking about holding her hand as she wandered the improbably clean streets of the City of Light, and about the soft look of her face in the low dusk light as they ate dinner, and about every evening that he leaves her room in Alpha Station and regrets that he cannot stay.

"About what you asked me," she adds, "about paradise."

"What about it?"

She steps closer, bumps her arm against his arm. "You never told me what you think it's like."

Bellamy sighs. He sticks his hands in his pockets, tilts his head back to the sky, but doesn't answer, not right away. He can feel Clarke watching him. It's not that he doesn't know what to say, but that he cannot quite put his thoughts into words; he isn't sure how to explain in a way she'll understand, and won't find stupid, or shallow, or weird.

"I read this book once," he says, finally. It's almost completely dark by now. A single cloud, a dark-grey shadow on the near-black, slides toward the city. "There was one scene where the main character looks up at the sky and sees a flock of birds flying across it. They're not in formation and there are so many of them that they pattern the whole sky, everything he can see, just...covered with these birds, all flying with the same purpose. And he was so moved by the beauty of them that he stood there and watched until they'd all disappeared."

He lets his gaze drop down again. Clarke is still watching him, and when he looks at her, she takes a step closer and winds her arm through his arm, slides her fingers through his fingers.

"That's what I think paradise is like," Bellamy adds. "Not the birds flying but the feeling he had while watching them."

"A feeling of awe at the beauty of the world?"

"Something like that."

He takes his hand from hers and wraps his arm around her shoulder instead. She curls her arm around him too, just above his waist. The part of him that is still reticent, flirting with fear, says this closeness is for warmth in the fading of the day, but the rest of him knows better.

"What about you?" he asks. "What's your answer?"

"Earth,” Clarke answers, not a trace of hesitation in her voice. “The real Earth." She hugs him closer, and he finds himself with his nose in her hair, breathing her in. "And—" She pulls back slightly and tips her face up to him. The moment, time itself, seems to slow. "Being here with you. Being on Earth with _you_."

She says the words low and quiet, as if they were a confession, and rests her hand on his cheek, and then leans up, so he leans in. He pulls her close until she's all but lifted off her feet. Her body is crushed against his and her fingers are tugging at his hair; their noses bump together. He can feel her breath on his lips.

When they kiss at last it is hesitant, a slow kiss that they slide into, the culmination of uncountable small intimacies that have built and built into this: a desperate longing fulfilled that floods his chest. He never wants to let go. And he won’t. He won’t. Even when they do pull apart, walk back down the path to the Rover, explore the city, return to Arkadia, and to whatever is beyond—he’s sure of this. He won’t let go.

**Author's Note:**

> Bellamy and Clarke's picnic takes place on Brown's Island, Richmond, VA.


End file.
